Migrating from Kwik 1

With the upcoming release of Kwik 2 on September 18th, you may be asking how compatible is the new plugin with the current one. This post tries to clarify some anxieties 🙂

As I briefly mentioned in a previous post, Kwik 2 brings several new features that are not compatible with Kwik (you cannot create a project in Kwik 2 and expect to import/work it back in Kwik 1). Also, due its focus on full apps (not comics), some features available in Kwik are not available in Kwik 2.

Let’s talk about what is NOT available in Kwik 2:

• Comics: some of you already know that Kwik 1 can create comics projects using the old Corona Comic SDK. This SDK was never updated and lacks lots of improvements. As Corona Labs does not have intentions to update it, I cannot afford the burden to do it myself (especially considering the low amount of users willing to create comics only projects). If you want to create comics as you currently do in Kwik 1, my suggestion is to keep using it until I can reproduce the camera feature in Kwik 2;
• Mute/Unmute: as Kwik 2 has several controls for audio, there is no more a Mute/Unmute feature. The current feature uses as especial kind of button (toggle) that is not available in Kwik 2 at this moment;
• Audio into animations windows:  in Kwik 1 you can import and add an audio to play directly from the animation window. In Kwik 2, all audio files must be imported in the page, then they can be used in other features, like the animation one;

In order to facilitate the transition/migration of your current projects to Kwik 2, there is a new and smart publishing system that checks all potential project issues before starting the publishing process. This feature not only shows where the problems are but also how to fix them. See the video below to understand how it works (thanks Greg Pugh for allowing me to use one screen of his Floating Fun, made with Kwik 2 app, as an example):

So, the amount of work spent on migration will be defined by the amount of issues found by the new publishing system. The larger the project, potentially, the large of the fixing list will be. Using Greg again as an example, he migrated his first, Kwik 1 made, book The Perfect Pillow, to Kwik 2 in a matter of few hours. You can read more about Greg’s projects in our Showcase.

Looking forward to hear your thoughts about this new feature (honestly, it is one of my favorites).